The continued physical feature size reduction and scaling of self-sustaining, low power consuming, and other microelectronic devices is currently limited in enclosure packaging reductions by the inclusion of a dedicated energy source for operation. For example, many current and future applications require self-sustaining integrated circuit packages and other microelectronic device packages that are able to perform specific functions and operate as independent elements within a sensory, communications, and/or computational network or domain. Such microelectronic device types may be or include single or mixed types of device technologies based on analog, digital, organic, molecular, nano-electronic, micro-electro-mechanical (MEMS), and nano-electro-mechanical (NEMS), among other device type technologies. Existing integration methods which include processes to assemble microelectronic devices with dedicated energy sources into a single product often require excessive semiconductor substrate real estate and/or complex interconnection processes to produce a self-sustainable and operational microelectronic product.
Microelectronic devices in current applications may be utilized as sensors and/or actuators, such as applications in the automotive, telecommunication, computing, consumer, medical, aerospace, and agriculture industries, among others. Such devices may be utilized to sense environmental and/or material characteristics, such as temperature, pressure, voltage, vibration and composition, among others. Such devices may also be employed to trigger actuators for any number of other electrical or mechanical devices. However, while data detected by such devices may be wirelessly transmitted to or received from a peripheral unit through existing wireless protocols (e.g., IEEE 802.11, BLUETOOTH, WiFi, WiMAX, software defined radio, and ultra wide band (UWB), among others) the devices must still be tethered or “plugged-in” to a power source to enable the sensing and wireless processing events. This fact can impose significant limitations on the implementation of sensors in many applications.